Producing the nation: borders, identity and gender in the construction of the national community by the Italian radical right

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the rise of the radical right and the emergence of anti-gender mobilisations have become one of the principal arenas of conflict within contemporary democracies. Although the anti-gender movement encompasses a diverse range of political, religious, and civic actors, in the Italian context it is primarily radical-right and far-right political forces that have played a leading role in opposing gender mainstreaming policies, understood as the set of strategies aimed at integrating a gender perspective into decision-making processes and public policymaking. Within this framework, the defence of the nation and its purported ethnocultural identity is closely intertwined with the promotion of the traditional family and the reaffirmation of gender models regarded as foundational to the social order. Recent scholarship has highlighted the increasingly central role of gender in both the ideological development and the political communication of the contemporary radical right. Building on these considerations, this article examines a corpus of 1,314 social media posts published between February and May 2026 by four political actors occupying different positions within the Italian political and institutional field– Giorgia Meloni, Matteo Salvini, Matteo Piantedosi, and Roberto Vannacci. Using a qualitative content analysis approach, the study investigates how gender-related issues are incorporated into the broader discursive construction of the nation, identity, and the social order. The results reveal significant differentiation among the four actors in the relative weight attributed to security, border control, identity, and the construction of alterity, while gender, although quantitatively marginal, performs a strategic function in organising the overall discursive architecture.